"Brainstorming is a terrible way to generate good ideas"

Interview with Prof Vincent Walsh of UCL, one of the world’s preeminent cognitive neuroscientists. Some interesting points from the interview:

1. You’re only aware of less than 1% of your brain activity, and most creativity happens in the other 99%.

2. If you want to stimulate an idea, you need to give your brain time to go “off-line”.

3. Creativity is not a team sport, and brainstorming is a terrible way to generate good ideas.

4. Execution of ideas is more important than generation, and previous failure helps this.

5. There are no miracle exercises / processes / drugs / brain implants to “turn on creativity” in areas where it didn’t previously exist.

6. However, creativity can be improved by giving people the right exercises, knowledge, experiences and environment.

I have grown as a programmer since I started working from home with real autonomy. The software created has, by far, been my best. I'm also productively creating features, architecting the system, etc. It feels great!

I'm healthier. I eat better. I exercise regularly. I'm able to take naps when I need one. I can meditate or zone out as needed. I feel focused.

There's less need to appease peers on a day to day basis. I can have streams of thought without having to communicate them. I can then reflect on these thoughts & communicate a coherent story when I am ready.

​I think sometimes you can strike gold with a good brainstorming session, but it is a rare occurrence. But I do agree forcing out ideas without much thought and in usually limited amounts of time can result in some horribly uncreative ideas.

You can't force an idea, they just come and history has proven you come up with creative solutions and ideas to things when you try and fail, sometimes hundreds and thousands of times.

Do you think Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb right away? He failed multiple times, he didn't succeed the first time he created something. In-fact, I am fairly certain although nobody knows the exact figure, but it was over 1000 attempts. The difference between a good idea and a bad one is experimentation and the execution of said idea.

Once you have the initial idea, it never hurts to have a post-idea brainstorm to help further refine the idea. Conception should be natural, but getting multiple people involved to refine the core idea I think is still a great way to help a great idea even better as you get more than one angle you should approach it from. Don't be confused here, this is a different kind of brainstorm, not an ideation brainstorm like the article touches upon.

Great article that I think some companies who insist on brainstorming should read before they decide to pull an all day brainstorming session that will ultimately result in most likely nothing substantial or worthwhile.

If you generalise the whole world of ideas and problem solving to the word "creativity" then I have no idea what conclusions you can make. There are a great many types of idea generation to solve unrelated classes of problem. Brain-storming is most definitely a valuable tool for some but not all situations.

i) discover what colleagues know about the issues

ii) widen options beyond what you are immediately aware

iii) make connections between different topics

iv) experience explaining and talking about a problem

v) get a feel of how emotionally invested colleagues are in particular decisions

vi) spot bogus assumptions and false premises

etc.

What's the alternative suggestion, nobody works together? This type of article plays to the seductive developer trap that you can to put your head down and work on problems in isolation. Its fun and optimal for small projects but it doesn't scale. You can only build garden sheds, you will never build cathedrals.

Whiteboards rock.

I actually find brainstorming a great way to refine existing ideas I've come up with but for which I don't have a clear picture of the details. Granted, it's something I'll do by myself and come back to it over time until I feel like I finally have clarity of purpose and implementation, but it is still a case of sitting there just dumping out a huge bullet point list of ideas and refinements as I think about the idea. Not only that, but often it also helps me expand the idea in directions I hadn't thought of, and sometimes pivot the idea into something even better.

My 2 cents on the topic would be: it takes time for the brain to find a creative solution to tackle the problem, so a person has got to give a thought some time, kind of let it run on the background on its own. I've used this technique a lot of times in my life. If I can't remember where I've put something, I don't try to find it asap. I try to distract myself from the task by anything like reading news, or making a cup of tea or doing some exercises, anything really. It takes considerably less efforts to find the thing or the right solution when I don't feel that it's life or death important. And after the thing or the solution is found, it's really worth of sharing your thought with people as they might help you see some weak sides of the way you are about to take and help with peices of advice. So all in all, the best approach imho is giving a problem some time, no rush, no panic, and then share ideas with people to get the most of it.

Sh*t ads swoop in while reading, which always in my mind degrades the trustworthiness of the content and causes me to look for an escape out.

I think a better process than brainstorming would be "idea brewing" (made up future-buzz-word :) ):

1. Making the concoction: tell people about the problem they need to solve and about where to find good infos on it (and hopefully also spark their interest about the problem, otherwise it's pointless), let's say at the start of the week...

2. Brew: just leave people alone for, let's say, a week, so ideas can "ferment" in their heads...

4. Distill: meet and talk with people, have them present and discuss ideas they had and select ("distill") the ones that can be really good, let's say at the end of the week.

...now, I've never tried the process in a formal enough manner to have proof that it works better than anything, else, but according to this guy's theory it should.

(now, if you use up the term "idea brewing" a bestseller buzzword-creating management or self-help book, please be a nice chap and give me some credit for it)

Using brainstorming in a business context is also problematic from a social psychological point of view: For brainstorming to work as planned (collecting lots of different ideas, every idea including the quirky ones count are valid at this stage, ideas only get filtered after the brainstorming session ends), certain criteria have to be met by the group doing the session. If the boss or a potentially competing colleague is around, most people won't brainstorm freely, even though the moderator says it's ok to get crazy. For brainstorming to work as intended the group has to be cooperative and without hierarchies (really without, not startuppy without). Otherwise, people will fear the criticism of the others and only speak about the too-dull-to-fail ideas.

Try out concepts as quickly and cheaply as possible. It's hard to know what works without real experiments, because idea guys think they've found the Fountain of Youth when they've just inspired people with charismatic snakeoil. Try something, anything already.

"Brainstorming sessions and equivalent ideation techniques like Creative Problem Solving have an ever-growing body of evidence showing them to be an ineffective way to generate good ideas."

Any links?

Does cathedral v. bazaar also apply to creativity?

Cathedral creativity = "divine spark" of the individual.

Bazaar = small/random steps shaped by the evolutionary processes of fork, commit, & pull.

I wonder how brainstorming in a collaborative text editor compares to real-life group brainstorming. In my experience using an EtherPad for brainstorming can be very fruitful because there is an element of both synchronous and asynchronous communitation. All parties can write down their ideas down simultaneously and one can comment very quickly and nonchalantly to other ideas at the same time.

What I think often happens in a culture where group brainstorming is common is that the few meeting specialist, often the gregarious managers, is the ones leading the meetings and is in the end labeled as the creative ones. In the end people will start to expect that these people will make the suggestions and the others will just give feedback.

I have found that brainstorming is great for getting a really good handle on the problem. Once I know exactly what the problem is with all the associated issues then I can start to think about the best solution. Often I just let the problem ferment in the background and the solution pops up when I am doing something unrelated.

I had always noticed that I never came up with any good ideas during a brainstorm session. I also worried that this made me seem unintelligent to my peers so I would spend a lot of time before or after the session creating and refining my ideas to compensate.

I'm glad to know I've been going about it effectively.

What fascinates me is that I learned about the ineffectiveness (in general) of brainstorming back in my first year of Communication Science, which was at least six years ago, and yet everyone around me still brainstorms all the time.

Why do businesses not take this research to heart?

Counter example: http://www.slashfilm.com/trivia-cafe-pixar-bugs-life-monster...

I thought this would be a (common) business oriented (language) presentation, so I was quite surprised (relieved).

Recently had a great idea regarding binary search trees, which came to me while felling a (real) tree, odd.

Brainstorming is where the initial kernel of good ideas comes from though, you take something from person A/B/C and combine it with your own - and that synergy is the source of good ideas.

If people did not have egos then brainstorming would work fine.

I find it is hard to be creative on the spot. I do like meetings that discuss a range of preconceived ideas.

I disagree with this. I've found that structured brainstorming and collaboration always yield better ideas and results than one person working solo.

I think brainstorming has demonstrated that is useful, I believe in teamwork. The key is not the brainstorming but the brainstormers or teamworkers

Brainstorming ins business is like jamming in music. Teams with great synergy can create great results.

"What's the value of trashing your talk"

It also causes your idea to evolve or die.

I read the book Quiet by Susan Cain. Brainstorming was likened to as the 'New Group Think' in that book.

The three reasons stated for the inefficiency of brainstorming are:

(1) Production blocking (Only one person can talk at a time while others listen. Think of a single entry queue.)

(2) Evaluation apprehension (Some (or most) people hesitate in presenting their idea because it might be critiqued or ridiculed.)

(3) Social Loafing (There are times when members of a group will slack-off because they know other members will take over the work.)